1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for identifying a place where a user has visited.
2. Background Art
In recent years, various mobile terminals have been utilized. These mobile terminals include a vehicle navigation apparatus that determines a user's position using the Global Positioning System (GPS) and guides the user to a destination, a portable telephone that provides a user with information regarding facilities in the vicinity of a user's current position using a positioning system with a base station, and the like.
Under such circumstances, technologies have been proposed for modeling the user's behavior and travel patterns, using a history of the position information obtained by such mobile terminals (for example, refer to Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 11-149596 publication, FIG. 1).
The above patent document discloses that a vehicle-equipped information apparatus accumulates beforehand time-series information regarding a driver's driving history (such as visited places) determined by the GPS positioning, then presumes a place to which the user is supposed to get (a destination) based on the accumulated information, and provides the user with a name of the destination, an estimated time required to get there, and the like.
Besides the above patent document, another technology discloses that it determines a user's visiting place using a base station which a user's carrying PHS or portable telephone makes contact with, accumulates time-series information of the visited places, then presumes a likely destination of the user based on the accumulated information, and provides the user with information regarding the destination.
However, there is a problem: The base station of the portable telephone or PHS suffers from a positional error of several dozen meters even with the best accuracy for determining the visiting place so that it cannot pinpoint a specific facility where the user is visiting although it can determine an area in which the facility exists.
In the above patent document, the GPS accuracy is several meters so that the technology enables to determine the user's position more accurate than the technology using the portable telephone and PHS with the base station does. However, the problem still remains that it cannot pinpoint which facility the user is visiting, when the user visits a shopping mall that packs a plurality of facilities or a multi-tenant building that accommodates a plurality of independent shops.
Thus, the conventional mobile terminals cannot determine a user's visiting place with high accuracy so that it is impossible to model the user's behavior patterns, let alone presume the user's destination.
The present invention addresses the above problem and provides an apparatus and method for identifying a visited place in order to identify with high accuracy where the user has exactly visited.